Pool Corporation distributes swimming pool supplies, equipment and related leisure products. The company distributes irrigation and landscape maintenance products in the United States.
As of December 31, 2024, the company operated 448 sales centers in North America, Europe, and Australia, from which it sells swimming pool supplies, equipment, and related leisure products, irrigation and landscape maintenance products, and hardscape, tile, and stone products to its customer base, including pool...
Pool Corporation distributes swimming pool supplies, equipment and related leisure products. The company distributes irrigation and landscape maintenance products in the United States.
As of December 31, 2024, the company operated 448 sales centers in North America, Europe, and Australia, from which it sells swimming pool supplies, equipment, and related leisure products, irrigation and landscape maintenance products, and hardscape, tile, and stone products to its customer base, including pool builders, retail stores, service companies, landscape contractors, and others, through its five distribution networks: SCP Distributors (SCP), Superior Pool Products (Superior), Horizon Distributors (Horizon), National Pool Tile (NPT), and Sun Wholesale Supply (Sun Wholesale).
Business Strategy and Growth Strategy
The company’s core strategies are to promote the growth of its industry, to promote the growth of its customers’ businesses, and to continuously strive to operate more effectively.
The company promotes the growth of its industry through various advertising and promotional programs intended to raise consumer awareness of new and existing product offerings by its vendors, the benefits and affordability of pool ownership, the ease of pool maintenance, and the many ways in which a pool and the surrounding spaces may be enjoyed beyond swimming. These programs include digital and media advertising, industry-oriented website development, such as www.swimmingpool.com, www.hottubs.com, and www.nptpool.com, social media platforms, and other digital marketing initiatives, including its new, all-inclusive Regal and E-Z Clor Pool Care mobile apps that enable at-home water testing, as well as its NPT Backyard mobile app. The company uses these programs as tools to educate consumers and lead prospective pool owners to its customers. It also promotes the growth of its industry by offering a growing selection of energy-efficient and environmentally friendly products, which support sustainability and can help pool owners save energy, water, time, and money. The company’s environmentally friendly technology products include variable speed pumps, LED pool and hot tub lights, and high-efficiency heat pumps. The company’s Horizon sales centers offer organic fertilizers, organic pesticides, and irrigation and drainage products that reduce water usage and soil erosion, allowing its customers and homeowners to have less of an impact on freshwater reserves.
The company promotes the growth of its customers’ businesses by offering the broadest product assortment through the largest number of conveniently located market-based sales centers and through comprehensive support programs that include promotional tools and marketing support to help its customers generate increased sales. It provides in-depth product training that allows its customers to expand the scope of their product offerings. The company also provides uniquely tailored advertising programs through its EDGE Marketing Portal that include such features as digital marketing, customer lead generation, personalized websites, brochures, direct mail, marketing campaigns, and business development training. It assists certain customers with aspects of their businesses, including site selection, store layout and design, product merchandising, comprehensive product offering selections, and efficient ordering and inventory management processes. In addition to these programs, the company features consumer showrooms in many of its sales centers and hosts its annual Retail Summit to educate its customers about product offerings and the overall industry. It also functions as a day-to-day resource by offering product and market expertise to serve its customers’ unique needs.
The company creates capacity with business-to-business (B2B) development tools and execution aimed at developing best-in-class service and value creation for its customers and suppliers. In particular, its POOL360 and Horizon 24/7 B2B internet and mobile platforms help its customers be more productive by allowing them to digitally review and order its products while leveraging its customer service staff resources, particularly during peak business periods. These tools offer real-time integration into its enterprise resource planning system, creating efficiencies in its business processes and also provide its customers graphical catalog presentation in the same platform. The company’s BlueStreak mobile ordering platform enables its sales associates to process orders faster, often eliminating the need for customers to get out of their vehicles. Similarly, it employs velocity slotting technology and other processes to enhance the operational efficiencies of its sales centers and warehouses.
Ongoing investments in digital transformation and technology help the company provide best-in-class service to the company’s customers by improving the customer experience, enhancing its existing customer relationships, and expanding its customer base. To that end, a part of its growth strategy includes investing in technology that allows it to better serve its customers and using this information to make better data-driven decisions for its business. The company’s POOL360 digital ecosystem is a suite of SaaS products transforming the way pool professionals do business. POOL360 WaterTest and POOL360 PoolService are tools designed to unlock capacity for its customers and its sales center network. By integrating e-commerce, software applications, and data-driven insights, POOL360 enhances both customer experience and operational efficiency. POOL360 WaterTest is a professional water testing software available to its retail customers that incorporates its complete line of proprietary-branded pool and hot tub chemicals into pool owners’ water chemistry maintenance requirements. The company’s POOL360 PoolService mobile application allows pool professionals to better manage their service business by providing a complete Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, routing, billing, and other day-to-day management capabilities, while improving their customers’ experiences. Each of these tools links directly into its POOL360 B2B platform, creating efficiencies for both the company and its customers. Going forward, the company plans to continue growing its suite of POOL360 technologies with additional resources for its customers.
The company has grown its distribution networks through new sales center openings, acquisitions, and the expansion of existing sales centers depending on its market presence and capacity.
The company plans to continue to make strategic acquisitions and open new sales centers to further penetrate existing markets and expand into both new geographic markets and new product categories.
Customers and Products
The company serves roughly 125,000 customers, most of which are small, family-owned businesses with relatively limited capital resources. Most of these businesses provide labor and technical services to the end consumer and operate as independent contractors and specialty retailers employing few, if any, employees. These customers also buy products from other distributors, mass merchants, home stores, and certain specialty and internet retailers.
The company provides extended payment terms to qualified customers for sales under pre-season early buy programs, which typically occur during the fourth and first quarters. The extended terms usually require payments in equal installments during the second quarter of each year.
The company sells its products primarily to the following types of customers: swimming pool remodelers and builders; specialty retailers that sell swimming pool supplies, including independently owned and operated Pinch A Penny franchise stores; swimming pool repair and service businesses; irrigation construction and landscape maintenance contractors; and commercial pool operators and pool contractors who build, remodel, or service large commercial installations, such as hotels, universities, and community recreational facilities.
The company conducts its operations through 448 sales centers in North America, Europe, and Australia. Its primary markets, those with the highest concentration of swimming pools, are Florida, California, Texas, and Arizona, collectively representing approximately 54% of its 2024 net sales. In 2024, it generated approximately 96% of its sales in North America (including Canada and Mexico), 4% in Europe, and less than 1% in Australia.
The company uses local sales and marketing personnel to promote the growth of its business and develop and strengthen its customers’ businesses. Its sales and marketing personnel focus on developing customer training programs and promotional activities, creating and enhancing sales management tools, and providing product and market expertise. The company’s local sales personnel work from its sales centers as trusted resources for its customers and are charged with understanding and meeting its customers’ specific needs. The company’s sales center personnel help educate its customers on a variety of topics, including the newest, most innovative products and solutions that can elevate their businesses.
The company offers its customers more than 200,000 manufacturer and proprietary and exclusive brand products. It sells the following types of products: maintenance products, such as chemicals, supplies, and pool accessories; repair and replacement parts for pool equipment, such as cleaners, filters, heaters, pumps, and lights; building materials, such as concrete, plumbing, and electrical components, both functional and decorative pool surfaces, decking materials, tile, hardscapes, and natural stone, used for pool installations and remodeling; pool equipment and components for new pool construction and the remodeling and replacement of existing pools; irrigation and related products, including irrigation system components and professional turf care equipment and supplies; commercial pool products, including American Society of Material Engineers-certified heaters, safety equipment, commercial decking equipment, and commercial pumps and filters; fiberglass pools and hot tubs and packaged pool kits, including walls, liners, braces, and coping for in-ground and above-ground pools; and other pool construction and recreational products, which consist of a number of product categories and include discretionary recreational and related outdoor living products, such as grills and components for outdoor kitchens.
The company has over 650 product lines and approximately 45 product categories. Based on its 2024 product classifications, sales for its pool and hot tub chemicals product category represented approximately 15% of total net sales for 2024.
The company continues to identify new related product categories, and it typically introduces new categories each year in select markets. It then evaluates the performance in these markets and focuses on those product categories that exhibit the best long-term growth potential.
The company offers a growing selection of energy-efficient and environmentally friendly products, which support sustainability and can help pool owners save energy, water, time, and money over time. Major equipment manufacturers have developed and will continue to develop more retrofit kits that allow homeowners to interact with their pools or hot tubs through their smartphones. The company sees each of these developments as significant growth opportunities for its business.
The company has increased its product offerings and service abilities related to commercial swimming pools. The company considers the commercial market to be a key growth opportunity as it focuses more attention on providing products to customers who operate and service large commercial installations, such as hotels, condominiums, apartment complexes, universities, and community recreational facilities. It continues to leverage its existing sales center networks and customer and vendor relationships to grow this market.
Operating Strategy
The company distributes swimming pool supplies, equipment, and related leisure products domestically through its SCP and Superior sales center networks and internationally through its SCP network. It adopted the strategy of operating two distinct distribution networks within the U.S. swimming pool market primarily to offer its customers a choice of distinctive product selections, locations, and service personnel. The company distributes irrigation, landscape maintenance, and related products through its Horizon network.
Swimming pool tile, decking materials, and interior pool surfacing products are distributed through the company’s NPT network, as well as through SCP and Superior networks. The company’s NPT network primarily serves the swimming pool market with its market-leading brand of pool tile and composite pool finish products but also provides some overlap with the irrigation and landscape industry as it offers NPT hardscapes and other outdoor living products. As consumers create and enhance outdoor living areas and invest more in their outdoor environment, the company can focus its resources to address such demand by leveraging its existing pool and irrigation and landscape maintenance customer base. In addition to its 18 stand-alone NPT sales centers, it has 117 SCP and Superior sales centers that feature consumer showrooms where swimming pool and landscape contractors, as well as homeowners, can view and select pool components, including pool tile, decking materials, and interior pool finishes in various styles and grades. The company also offers virtual tools for homeowners to select and design their pool and outdoor environments, collaborating with their chosen contractors to install these products. Its NPT Backyard mobile app and www.nptpool.com allow its customers to virtually design, customize, and view a pool in their own backyard in a short amount of time.
Sun Wholesale Supply distributes swimming pool supplies, equipment, and related leisure products, primarily servicing independently owned and operated Pinch A Penny franchise locations. Since the company’s acquisition in December 2021, it has expanded Pinch A Penny franchise operations through additional locations of Pinch A Penny franchised stores and plans to continue these expansion initiatives. Sun Wholesale Supply also owns and operates a specialty chemical re-packaging plant providing pool chemical products to the Pinch A Penny franchised store network and a portion of the chemical products sold through its SCP and Superior networks.
The company evaluates its sales centers based on their performance relative to predetermined standards that include both financial and operational measures. Its corporate support groups provide its field operations with various services, such as developing and coordinating customer and vendor-related programs, real estate support services to find appropriate locations for its sales centers, human resources support, information systems support, support from its logistics and fleet teams, accounting and financial analysis support, and expert resources to help them achieve their goals.
Distribution
The company’s sales centers are located within population centers near customer concentrations, typically in industrial, commercial, or mixed-use zones.
The company’s sales centers generally maintain well-stocked inventories to meet its customers’ immediate needs. It utilizes warehouse management technology to optimize receiving, inventory control, picking, packing, and shipping functions.
The company also operates four centralized shipping locations (CSLs) in the United States and one CSL in Europe that redistribute products it purchases in bulk quantities to its sales centers or, in some cases, directly to customers. Its CSLs are regional locations that carry a wide range of outdoor living products.
Suppliers
The company’s largest suppliers include Pentair plc, Zodiac Pool Systems, Inc., and Hayward Pool Products, Inc., which accounted for approximately 20%, 12%, and 11%, respectively, of the cost of products it sold in 2024.
Seasonality
The company’s business is seasonal. In 2024, it generated approximately 60% of its net sales and 73% of its operating income in the second and third quarters of the year (year ended December 31, 2024).
The company typically experiences a build-up of product inventories and accounts payable during the winter months in anticipation of the peak selling season. Excluding borrowings to finance acquisitions, dividend payments, and share repurchases, the company’s peak borrowing usually occurs during the second quarter, primarily because extended payment terms offered by certain of its suppliers are typically payable in April, May, and June, while its peak accounts receivable collections typically occur in June, July, and August.
Based on the company’s peak summer selling season, it generally opens new sales centers and closes or consolidates sales centers, when warranted, either in the first quarter before the peak selling season begins or in the fourth quarter after the peak selling season ends.
Government Regulations
The company’s business is subject to a wide variety of regulations, principally under local fire codes and international, federal, state, and local environmental and health and safety requirements, including regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Department of Transportation, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Fire Protection Agency, and the International Maritime Organization. Most of these requirements govern the packaging, labeling, handling, transportation, storage, and sale of chemicals and fertilizers. The company stores certain types of chemicals and/or fertilizers at each of its sales centers, and the storage of these items is strictly regulated by local fire codes. In addition, it sells algaecides and pest control products that are regulated as pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and various state pesticide laws. These laws primarily relate to labeling, annual registration, and licensing.
History
Pool Corporation was founded in 1993. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 1993.
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